MARCH 15, 1999:
A few days into my quest for an interview with documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield,
I began to feel like a Broomfield manqué, stalking serial killer Aileen Wuornos
or Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss -- or trying to outfox Courtney Love. His L.A. office
told me he was shooting commercials abroad but agreed to relay my request for a few
minutes of his time. A day later, on Friday, a fax arrived with phone numbers telling
me that Nick would prefer to do a telephone interview from London on Sunday before
he left for Israel, at which point he would be seriously out-of-pocket.

With practically no time to prepare, I ran out and rented Kurt and Courtney
(1997), shoved it into the VCR, and started frantically dialing a coterie of UT documentary makers in search of fodder for the next day's interview. As I left messages on answering machines of these filmmakers (some of whom I knew were out of town, and others of whose phone numbers I was uncertain), I kept redirecting my attention to the video, seeking clues as to who Broomfield was from his flat, unemotive, Brit-accented narration of his no-holds-barred investigation of the facts behind Nirvana rocker Kurt Cobain's death.

A short while into the film, my task became a lot easier -- there was Broomfield,
no longer the disembodied interrogator, but now fully visible on the screen, formidably
wired from the waist up with sound equipment, boom mike, and earphones, doing a sort
of Mike Wallace/Ross McElwee/Jerry Springer number on anyone from Seattle to Los
Angeles who might know something or have an opinion as to whether Kurt really killed
himself -- as officially pronounced -- or was offed at the behest of his wife, Courtney
Love, the theory propounded by her tough-loving dad. Broomfield wielded his mike
and cameraman like a foil, barging in on the unsuspecting and drug-addled, en-guarding
them with his boom mike and blunt questions (and disbelieving "Really!"s),
looking for some socko way to put it to Courtney, who during production had gotten
wind of the film and done everything she could to roll boulders into its path. (She
would later succeed in having the finished film yanked from Sundance in 1998, and,
with all the publicity that generated, guarantee its successful distribution.)

The phone rings and we watch Broomfield pick up the phone and overhear his Showtime
sponsor announcing that they're yielding to pressure to yank his funding. My phone
rings and it's doc maker Paul Stekler returning my call from a pay phone at the Newark airport. He suggests I call his colleague, Richard Lewis, who worked with Broomfield on Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, and gives me Lewis' home phone number, a number different from the one I'd left a message on earlier. "Here's what I'd like to know," Stek said, before dashing for his plane. "Why don't you ask him how his filmmaking evolved from his early cinema vérité style -- where he's totally in the background -- to where he's now actually in the film? Oh, and maybe ask him if he's ever thought about making a film about some, uh ... "sweet" topic -- maybe something having to do with, say, public affairs?" Perhaps a bit of projection on Stek-the-consummate-political doc maker's part, I chuckle to myself, before the line is clipped by my call-waiting signal -- the wrong Richard Lewis returning my call.

The "right" Richard Lewis and I play phone tag right up until Sunday
midmorning, my planned early afternoon phone call looming. "Now, you wouldn't
write anything that makes Nick mad at me would you?" Lewis demands right off
the bat. "Oh, no," I reassure him with my fingers crossed. "Broomfield
thrives on controversy, you know," Lewis explained, "his style is very
combative, in-your-face. He thrusts himself into other people's lives and then becomes
a player himself. It becomes 'his' journey. Remember Michael Moore's Roger &
Me? Broomfield's films tend to be structured like that, where the person the
film's really about -- Aileen Wuornos, Maggie Thatcher, Courtney Love -- is not present."

Did you learn anything from working with him for a year? "I was right out
of graduate school then and I thought documentaries were 60 Minutes -- you
know, intercut talking heads. I started cutting Aileen Wuornos like that and
Nick starts screaming, 'What are you doing?' He doesn't do talking heads answering
each other; it's a linear progression through the story. Broomfield's definitely
had a positive influence on my filmmaking, as far as the storytelling aspect goes.
He's a real perfectionist; he knows the story he wants and keeps working at it until
he gets it right. Good isn't good enough -- it has to be great. As far as the mise-en-scène
aspect of a film, Nick doesn't care much about lighting or production values."

Before he signs off he gives me the number of a cameraman in town who'd worked
with Broomfield and who he thinks would have a lot to say. I call and leave a message.

While I wait, I decide to see if I can find anything useful about Broomfield on
the Web and come across an interview in which he answers the very question Stek wanted
me to ask: how he moved from the silent, unacknowledged observer to an actual character
in his own films. Broomfield explained there that he'd come to realize that his observational
films left out what, in hindsight, he believed to be the most revealing scenes, namely,
those that showed the process of making the film. By putting himself into his films,
he discovered that he was able to get closer to what was really going on and what
his subjects were really like. Hence the switch to the diary form.

When asked whether having him as our guide leaves us with enough wiggle room to
disagree with his interpretations, the filmmaker said he believed that, unlike the
authoritarian narrators of traditional documentaries, his hit-or-miss, shoot-from-the-hip
style gives the audience enough subjective information about him to be able to question
his objectivity.

Me: So, Paul, what surprised you the most about working with Broomfield?

Paul Kloss: I always thought you got the most out of an interview
by making your subject feel as comfortable as possible, so it struck me as very odd
-- at least at first -- to discover that Nick liked to put his subjects into a state
of uneasiness. Think, for example, about the way you shoot a typical TV news interview:
You'd arrive carrying your sound and lighting equipment at your side, you'd wait
to get invited in, you'd walk around the place, pick a nice spot, light it, and then
sit down to shoot the interview. With Nick, you're driving down the street, shooting
him driving down the street; you shoot him getting out of the car and knocking at
the door and when the subject opens the door, you're shooting them. Now, these people
know that he's coming to interview them, but they're usually not prepared to open
the door to a running camera -- when they see that -- Nick with his sound equipment,
me, with the camera on, and an assistant -- all they want to do is get away from us.
Sometimes that works really well; after a while I started to see the beauty in it.
In a way you get an almost more candid reaction from them, they don't have time to
get into character or come up with a defense or anything, no time to prepare -- even
though, yes, they were expecting him.

Me: I bet people are disarmed by his British accent.

PK: Yes. But he's certainly not afraid to ask some direct, confrontational
questions. And when people react negatively, he just responds right back. One time
we were filming Peter Sellers' daughter, Victoria Sellers, who was a good friend
of Heidi. We'd been trying to track her down for a long time and finally arranged
an interview. She's this scatterbrained type and the interview was not going well.
Nick stopped the camera and said as much, in essence demanding that she be a better
interviewee. She denied it at first: "What? What? I'm answering you right!"
He told her he knew there was more to the story than she was telling him and if she
didn't come out with it, they'd best just forget it. She did much better.

Me: She obviously wanted to be in the film. Do people usually want
to be in his films, is that why they agree to talk to him?

PK:Well, uh, usually they were being paid. In L.A., especially
for that film, no one's going to talk to you unless you pay them. Some of the characters
we were dealing with were pretty shady.

Me: How does being paid affect their credibility?

PK: Usually they appear more than once in the film so the viewer
gets to know them as characters and is then able to judge their credibility.

I anxiously glance at the clock -- ever cognizant that it's six hours later in
London -- and decide that no matter how late, I simply must watch the rest of Kurt
and Courtney before I talk to Broomfield. I slide the cassette back into the
machine for the last 20 minutes. Darn if that's not Broomfield leaping onto the stage
at an ACLU banquet where Love, the guest speaker, whom we've just seen in graphic
footage to be no booster of the fourth estate, has just finished extolling the beauty
of the First Amendment. Broomfield, filming from the audience, can restrain himself
no longer. He impulsively hands the running camera to his companion with orders to
keep it aimed at the stage and, hijacking a podium, launches into a statement condemning
the ACLU's hypocrisy in honoring the famously media-threatening Love. Then he's strong-armed
off the stage.

It's now 1pm -- 7pm London time. I quickly make a list of questions, order them from
least to most confrontational, and dial his cell phone number. I get the voice mail.
I leave a message. A shot of my clock radio: 3pm. I leave another message. A montage
of me at a theatre, watching an early movie with my son and later, at a restaurant,
gobbling a hasty dinner with him. Zoom to the clock radio: 6pm. My voice leaving
the last message of the day. Roll the credits.